The first time I baked unattended was disastrous. During the very first month of my freshman year of college, my new best girlfriends and I decided at midnight on a Thursday that we would bake chocolate chip cookies for all of our friends—who were also wide awake at this hour, of course. The majority of our class lived in a brownstone where the resident assistant, Steve, had a tiny kitchen, which he finally granted us after ten minutes of flirtatious pleading. He was a tiny, studious person who read Hume while we consulted the recipe on the back of the Nestle bag. I doubt Steve had ever used his mini stove, and I doubt my fellow bakers had any more experience with the culinary arts than I did. Perhaps Steve’s oven was too hot, or we were inattentive, but we burnt our first batch of cookies to charred crisps, filling Steve’s studio with the acrid scent of scorched chocolate. We waved our dishrags at the stove to dispel the haze, and set one of the rags on fire. Steve pretended not to notice. I suppose he found Hume more interesting than four freshman girls capering in his kitchen, waving things about and giggling.
Our second and third batches were more successful, and we delivered cookies to each dorm room, giddy with triumph and chocolate fumes. Those who had stepped out or, astonishingly, had gone to sleep, got a scorched cookie taped to their doorknobs.
The second time I cooked unattended also resulted in charred bits… but for that story stay tuned for the next installment of Culinary Adventures of an Unattended College Freshman.
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